For my first venture into the Summer Cool Tools for Schools learning experience, I set up an account with Netvibes and explored that. Netvibes has changed a bit since the tutorial by Tim Sparke from three years ago, but it helps to get a feel for the customizable homepage. Here are some of my additions (pictured below). I love screen casts and video tutorials, and one of my major goals of the summer was to delve into screencasts. It will have to continue into the fall.
This past year I have used Symbaloo, to make it easier to access the school year Cool Tools links. I set up both a regular and EDU Symbaloo account, but had not explored its RSS reader potential. I’ll delve into that more during the school year, as I continue to compare Netvibes and Symbaloo. As a visual learner, I enjoy the tiles in Symbaloo. RSS Feed lists tend to overwhelm me.
After reading Joyce Valenza’s article on dashboard decisions (from 2013), I became fascinated with the idea of using a public myfav.es link for the Computer Apps classes I will be teaching this year at middle grade level. I set one up and linked it to our Library Media Center OPALS site: http://opalssm.dcmoboces.com/bin/home . It’s listed as Keyboarding under the Web Links section (direct link: https://www.myfav.es/mgattolmc). Myfav.es is great for 10 free tiles. A feature I would like to have available is the ability to have a label show up on the tile, as is possible on the Symbaloo tiles.
The single most useful tool that I use every day within Microsoft is the Snipping Tool. I keep it on my bottom tool bar and use it all the time in tutorials, Symbaloo tile creation, and now with the myfav.es creation (as the link buttons had to be created for the URLs I chose). In the past I would do screen saves/print screens, but the Snipping Tool is way more convenient! |